Annual Research Awardees

Every year the Office for the Advancement of Research issues a call for application for our Annual Research Awards and every year a variety of faculty members are selected to receive these awards. To see our most recent call for applications, please visit here.

2018-19 Awardees

2018 Scholarly Excellence Award Winners

Belinda Rincon, Latin American and Latinx StudiesBelinda Linn Rincón is an Associate Professor in the departments of Latin American and Latina/o Studies and English and is the co-founder and co-Director of the U.S. Latina/o Literature Minor Program. She specializes in Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural studies, Latina feminisms, and war and militarism. Her book Bodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and Culture (2017, University of Arizona Press) examines the rise of neoliberal militarism from the early 1970s to the present and its political, ontological, and aesthetic implications for the Chicana/o community. Through Chicana art, activism, and writing, Bodies at War offers a visionary foundation for an antiwar feminist politic. Rincón has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies and Latino Studies. In 2015, she won the Antonia I. Castañeda Essay Award given by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies for her article in Women’s Studies Quarterly. The award recognizes the best essay published by an untenured Chicana scholar that provides a historical and intersectional analysis of Chicana/Latina and/or Indigenous women. She received the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and fellowships from the American Association of University Women; the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center; the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program; and the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. Her current book project, provisionally titled “Il/legal Subjects: Intersections of Love and Law in Latina/o Culture,” draws on the work of Western philosophers, feminist and affect theorists, and women of color scholarship to examine how an ethics of love depicted in Latina/o literary and cultural production can remake our notions of freedom, justice, sovereignty, and the law. She is the co-founder of the Biennial Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference which consistently convenes over 200 scholars from around the country at John Jay to showcase the major critical directions that scholars are forging in the field.

Charlotte Walker-Said, Africana StudiesCharlotte Walker-Said is a historian of modern Africa and Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at John Jay College. Her research is in three principal areas: the transnational character of Christianity and its influence on gender politics and family law in Africa; the socially diverse African Christian communities that have responded uniquely to the upheavals of the colonial and postcolonial periods; and human rights in Africa. She recently completed a manuscript on the history of religion and society in colonial Africa entitled Faith, Power, and Family: Christianity and Social Transformation in French Cameroon, published by James Currey Press. She has also edited Corporate Social Responsibility? Human Rights in the Global Economy, which was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2015. Dr. Walker-Said received an American Association of University Women American Publication Grant in 2015 as well as five University Committee on Research Awards from PSC-CUNY from 2013-2017, which funded her travels to Cameroon and France to conduct archive research and oral interviews. At John Jay College, she teaches courses on human rights law in Africa, religion in Africa, and the modern and pre-modern history of Africa.

Philip Yanos, PsychologyPhilip Yanos (Professor in the Psychology Department) is a 2nd generation native New Yorker and parent of two public school students. A clinical psychologist, he joined the faculty at John Jay in 2006 and has been thrilled by the opportunities he has had to conduct research and collaborate with students and faculty. The past few years have been some of his most productive, as he recently published a book (Written Off: Mental Health Stigma and the Loss of Human Potential), completed two federally-funded grants, and taken on the role of Director of Clinical Training for the clinical psychology Ph.D. program. He loves what he does and is proud to be a public servant at the City University of New York.

Yuliya Zabyelina, Political Science

Yuliya Zabyelina is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. Before moving to the United States, she completed her doctoral dissertation in International Studies at the University of Trento (Italy), held a postdoctoral position at the University of Edinburgh School of Law (UK), and lectured at Masaryk University (Czech Republic). Throughout these appointments, Dr. Zabyelina has taught a diverse curriculum both at undergraduate and graduate levels and developed interdisciplinary expertise in (transnational) organized crime studies, international law, and security governance with a regional focus on countries of the former Soviet Union. Since 2014, the year of her initial appointment at John Jay College, Dr. Zabyelina has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Money Laundering Control (2015) and produced 9 peer-reviewed, mostly single-authored, journal articles, 6 invited book chapters, 10 encyclopedia entries, and 6 policy papers. She has also given 6 invited talks (fully funded by organizers) and 13 presentations at academic conferences and professional workshops. She has also completed a competitive international fellowship at Aleksanteri Institute (Helsinki, Finland) in 2014 and collaborated with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in the framework of the Education for Justice (E4J) initiative that highlights the importance of education as a tool to preventing crime and corruption. In 2016, she was recognized with the Donald EJ MacNamara Junior Faculty Award from the Office for the Advancement of Research (OAR).

2016 Donal J. MacNamara Award Winner

Veronica Michel, Political Science

Verónica Michel is Assistant Professor of Political Science at John Jay College-CUNY, in New York City. Originally from Mexico City, she obtained a BA in International Relations from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include human rights and victim rights, rule of law, comparative and international criminal justice, cause lawyering, and legal mobilization, with a regional focus on Latin America.

Dr. Michel has published in peer-reviewed journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Law and Society Review, and the Journal of Human Rights. Her article "Human Rights Prosecutions and the Participation Rights of Victims in Latin America" (co-authored with Kathryn Sikkink) received the 2014 Best Journal Article Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association. This award recognizes the best journal article on law and courts written by a political scientist that was published in the previous calendar year. Her first book, Prosecutorial Accountability and Victims’ Rights in Latin America, was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press. In the book Dr. Michel describes how private prosecution improves access to justice for victims in Latin America.